It’s the conspiracy that just won’t die.
Fox News host Jesse Watters made a quip questioning the veracity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate Tuesday night during a live edition of The Five—just hours before the former president’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Watters prefaced the apparent joke by depicting Obama as “still the godfather of this machine”—a reference to the Democratic Party.
ADVERTISEMENT
“He gave us Joe Biden as VP. He gave us Hillary as secretary of state. Then he couped Joe, put all his boys with Kamala’s team, and had his wingman Holder vet Walz,” Watters said, referring to Obama’s former attorney general, Eric Holder.
“He’s definitely going to interfere in this election,” he claimed, using the same parlance as Donald Trump to describe otherwise routine intra-party dealings.
Watters, facetious or not, then framed the topic of Obama’s birth certificate as somehow fraught with mystery, and said he would be sending his producer to get to the bottom of whether or not it was real.
“That’s why we’ll be sending Johnny to Hawaii to get the truth about the birth certificate,” Watters told viewers. “This time we will dig deep and find out what really happened.”
Birtherism is the false notion that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, and therefore could not legally be elected president. Rather than being born in Hawaii, some wrongly alleged, Obama was born in Kenya, the present-day birthplace of his father. Trump himself helped spread birtherism, claiming years ago that he had sent investigators to Hawaii.
The subject has been investigated many times over the years, and there remains no evidence to suggest that Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen.
Trump would later give oxygen to similar baseless claims regarding another minority candidate, Kamala Harris, after Biden selected her as his running mate in 2020.
After Watters had his say, co-host Greg Gutfeld jumped in.
“Good point. You should tell Johnny that he needs to get a passport,” he said, another apparent joke that was met with sustained silence from the panel.
“To go to Kenya—I agree,” Watters replied, laughing.
“No,” Gutfeld clarified. “I meant to Hawaii, just to see him do it. Ask him what the exchange rate is for the Hawaiian dollar.”
